Video stuttering on esata upgraded Tivo S3

[LifeStar]

Hi guys, I'm new to the forum, but I have an issue that I'm wondering if I can get some help with.

I upgraded my Tivo S3 to use an external esata HD enclosure around sept'08. I went with the recommend Antex MX-1 and the recommended esata cable. I can't remember from the top of my head but I believe I used a WD10EADS 1TB HD. Things have been great with it for the most part, but recently I've been encountering video stuttering/pixelation and video pausing lately.

I'm wondering if the cause is that the HD in the enclosure is dying or not. I've noticed that if I were to soft reboot the system or reset the show I was watching and then quickly jump to where I left off, the video will continue without problem. I really don't want to lose the shows I've recorded so far, but would moving to the WD10EVCS after a disk-to-disk copy and replacing the drive inside the MX-1 with it remedy the situation?

[LifeStar]

So I received my new WD10EVCS drive last friday and went through a 24hr long disk-to-disk copy of my external esata drive to the new drive. It turned into 24hrs b/c the source drive had almost 2200 read errors during the imaging process, but thankfully I turned off the notifications for read+write errors.

Once that was done, I switched the drives. During the switch I realized that the original drive in the esata enclosure was a WD10EVCS too! I thought the failure rates on these HDs were suppose to be low. However, there have been a lot of power failures over the last few months so that might have damaged the drive. The original Tivo HD hasn't choked yet and it looks like the esata drive was the source of all the problems.

Been running for almost a week now without any problems. Tivo didn't even give me any grief when I turned it on as it immediately assumed the new esata HD was the same. Thought I'd let you guys know should you need to do some replacement surgery.